Bootstrap is a front-end framework for developing
responsive, mobile-first projects on the web. In this tutorial you'll get an overview of how it works, and what advantages it offers.

Bootstrap was created by Mark Otto and
Jacob Thornton at Twitter and released to the public in August 2011 under the MIT License. Among
other things, this license enables anyone to:

freely download and use Bootstrap, in whole or
in part, for personal, private, company internal, or commercial purposes

use Bootstrap in packages or distributions
that you create

modify the source code

Since its release on GitHub, Bootstrap has:

had 10,000+ commits

been starred 72,680+ times

forked 27,284+ times

and gathered 587+ contributors

Bootstrap has stayed on GitHub’s most trending list for months, if not years. Its
popularity can be attributed to the way it balances power with simplicity.
From the start, it was designed to cater to developers of all skill levels,
devices of all shapes, and projects of all sizes.

A Closer Look at Bootstrap

Directory Structure

Bootstrap has the following directory structure:

Boostrap consists of the following main components:

An
Advanced Grid System

The best feature of Bootstrap is the
advanced grid system, which enables developers to create responsive,
mobile-first templates using simple markup.

Components
(HTML/CSS)

Bootstrap includes over a dozen
reusable components built to provide iconography, dropdowns, input groups,
navigation, alerts and much more.

Plugins
(jQuery plugins)

Bootstrap ships with a dozen jQuery
plugins, designed to provide interactivity to the various components. These
plugins can be included individually or all at once.

Advantages

Supports the latest versions of all
major browsers.

Degrades gracefully.

Makes development faster and easier.

Made for people of all skill levels,
devices of all shapes, and projects of all sizes.

Supports two of the most popular CSS
preprocessors: LESS and SASS.

Well-documented.

Built With Bootstrap

The following is a list of reputable and well-known websites built with Bootstrap:

Newsweek

MSNBC

NASA

And thousands of themes in marketplaces
such as ThemeForest

Downloading Bootstrap

Several options exist when downloading Bootstrap, each catering to different needs and
skills levels.

If you want a customized version of Bootstrap, visit the custom download page to generate your own package.
This page allows advanced users to create customized versions of Bootstrap by
enabling them to select only the components that they desire and to adjust
various options to suit their needs.

Bootstrap Ecosystem

A comprehensive and growing ecosystem has mushroomed
around Bootstrap. This ecosystem consists of free and commercial templates,
third-party components, tools, and an active and helpful community.

Templates/Themes

Countless Bootstrap-based templates or themes have
been developed for most CMSs, frameworks and libraries.

Let’s have a closer look.

Frameworks

Templates exist for both front-end and
back-end frameworks. Examples of front-end framework templates that make use of
Bootstrap include the Bootstrap Theme for jQuery Mobile as well as AngularUI
for AngularJS.

On the back-end, CakePHP, Yii,
CodeIgniter, and Symfony all have
templates that are based on Bootstrap.

A Helpful and Active Community of Users

An active and vibrant community of users has grown
around Bootstrap. Thousands of tutorials, blog posts and code snippets
can be found all over the web, covering every aspect of Bootstrap.

Teams of developers collaborate on a daily basis to
build templates, third-party components, and other tools that help developers
build Bootstrap-based projects.

Conclusion

This article is an introduction to Bootstrap. In it,
we did not go into detail or provide a tutorial on using Bootstrap in your
projects. If you are not familiar with Bootstrap, please visit the homepage and check out the Getting Started page.

The purpose of this article was to introduce Bootstrap
and to build a case for why it is a good fit for a WordPress theme framework.

In the next article, we will give a higher-level
overview of our framework before we dive into writing some code.